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12 - Quark Confinement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2010

Leonard Susskind
Affiliation:
Born New York City, 1940; Ph.D., 1965 (physics), Cornell University; Professor of Physics at Stanford University; high-energy physics (theory).
Lillian Hoddeson
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Laurie Brown
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
Michael Riordan
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Max Dresden
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

In this chapter I present a personal reminiscence of the development of our current ideas about quark confinement. I describe what I remember of my own involvement and that of the people who influenced me. If others remember it differently, I hope they will not be too angry.

By the end of the 1960s our empirical knowledge of hadrons consisted of a vast mountain of data about their spectrum, their low- and high-energy interactions, and their electromagnetic and weak properties. To some extent the story of the eventual interpretation in terms of QCD was like digging a tunnel through the mountain with crews of diggers starting independently at the two ends. At one end was the short-distance behavior of local currents and its interpretation in terms of freely moving quark-parton constituents. At the other end was the low-momentum-transfer Regge structure including a spectrum of highly excited rotational states, shrinking diffraction peaks, and multihadron final states of peripheral collisions, but no free quarks. Sometime in 1973 the two tunnel crews discovered that they had met and a complete picture of the strong interactions existed. Of course the two crews were not entirely unaware of each other. The Regge workers were beginning to organize the trajectories by quantum numbers suggested by the quark model. Eventually, the Regge picture culminated in 1968 with a set of scattering amplitudes based on the duality principle of R. Dolen, D. Horn, and C. Schmidt.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Rise of the Standard Model
A History of Particle Physics from 1964 to 1979
, pp. 233 - 242
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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  • Quark Confinement
    • By Leonard Susskind, Born New York City, 1940; Ph.D., 1965 (physics), Cornell University; Professor of Physics at Stanford University; high-energy physics (theory).
  • Edited by Lillian Hoddeson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Laurie Brown, Northwestern University, Illinois, Michael Riordan, Stanford University, California, Max Dresden, Stanford University, California
  • Book: The Rise of the Standard Model
  • Online publication: 03 February 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511471094.014
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  • Quark Confinement
    • By Leonard Susskind, Born New York City, 1940; Ph.D., 1965 (physics), Cornell University; Professor of Physics at Stanford University; high-energy physics (theory).
  • Edited by Lillian Hoddeson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Laurie Brown, Northwestern University, Illinois, Michael Riordan, Stanford University, California, Max Dresden, Stanford University, California
  • Book: The Rise of the Standard Model
  • Online publication: 03 February 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511471094.014
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Quark Confinement
    • By Leonard Susskind, Born New York City, 1940; Ph.D., 1965 (physics), Cornell University; Professor of Physics at Stanford University; high-energy physics (theory).
  • Edited by Lillian Hoddeson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Laurie Brown, Northwestern University, Illinois, Michael Riordan, Stanford University, California, Max Dresden, Stanford University, California
  • Book: The Rise of the Standard Model
  • Online publication: 03 February 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511471094.014
Available formats
×